1803 Oscar Wilde http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41QV1CH6Q4L._SX80_.jpg 8 Oscar Wilde brings his enormous gifts for astute social observation and sparkling prose to The Picture of Dorian Gray, his dreamlike story of a young man who sells his soul for eternal youth and beauty. This dandy, who remains forever unchanged—petulant, hedonistic, vain, and amoral—while a painting of him ages and grows increasingly hideous with the years, has been horrifying, enchanting, obsessing, even corrupting readers for more than a hundred years. Taking the reader in and out of London drawing rooms, to the heights of aestheticism, and to the depths of decadence, The Picture of Dorian Gray is not only a melodrama about moral corruption. Laced with bon mots and vivid depictions of upper-class refinement, it is also a fascinating look at the milieu of Wilde’s fin-de-siècle world and a manifesto of the creed “Art for Art’s Sake.” The ever-quotable Wilde, who once delighted London with his scintillating plays, scandalized readers with this, his only novel. Upon publication, Dorian was condemned as dangerous, poisonous, stupid, vulgar, and immoral, and Wilde as a “driveling pedant.” The novel, in fact, was used against Wilde at his much-publicized trials for “gross indecency,” which led to his imprisonment and exile on the European continent. Even so, The Picture of Dorian Gray firmly established Wilde as one of the great voices of the Aesthetic movement, and endures as a classic that is as timeless as its hero. Dorian Gray – decadent archetype, anti-hero of Oscar Wilde’s only novel, an underground classic which scandalized society upon its publication in 1890. Dorian Gray, the debauched libertine who retains a veneer of eternal youth during decades of increasingly outlandish vice, depravity and corruption, while his portrait ages and rots in an attic. THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY is presented here in its rare original incarnation, the overtly homoerotic Lippincott edition, with an appendix sampling Wilde’s later revisions. Also included is a brilliant introduction by Jeremy Reed, detailing the two editions and realigning the book’s position in the history of subversive underground fiction. With its outré elements of homosexuality, drug abuse and supernatural horror, DORIAN GRAY remains Wilde’s most extreme creation, whilst also containing many of the mordant epigrams for which he is most renowned. It is a true classic of renegade literature. 5011